When you read the word "anger", what first comes to your mind? What do you picture? When I see anger, my mind does not present a pretty face. In my experience, anger is more than a frown. It is furrowed eyebrows, gnashing of teeth, a gaping, saliva-filled mouth and words so loud and sharp that that person might as well be barking. The movie Inside Out portrays anger as a red square with flames, but it also portrays it as male. In this movie and in the minds of many, anger has testosterone.

I guess it makes sense. If you review psychological studies, you learn how testosterone makes people strong and aggressive, like an alpha silver-back gorilla. The thing that I've noticed is that when guys get angry, they're something to be feared. But when girls get angry, it's almost weird. Not only is it considered unnatural, but some find it cute and non-threatening. In movies, the short, spunky girl starts getting upset and that "spiciness" is treated as a turn-on. But despite whatever gender you attribute to this emotional, it's not pretty. Anger is like acid that doesn't end until there's nothing left to consume.

So yes, when I say that anger makes us ugly, I mean it. And many people, females in particular, feel bad about expressing this emotion because "we all know that women are supposed to look good all the time! And when women don't look good, i.e. when they're mad, then what are they good for? We gotta shave away all those nasty passions so people are nice and attractive and well-behaved. We can't have no ladies thinkin they is anything more than a pretty picture, amiright?" (If you find what's in the quotations repugnant, then you understand why beauty and expression shouldn't so often conflict)

Anyway, society shows us that guys can get away with being angry, and girls just can't. Angry guys are a threat, and angry girls are obnoxious. The world sees a girl getting heated and throws words like "feminazi" or "period" around in order to douse her fire. They say that she just needs to "chill."

When I went away from court one day feeling more pathetic and weak than I have ever felt before, my guy friend told me to get angry. His suggestion made me feel like, suddenly, I had the license to say that I was not only frustrated or sad, but angry. I had never done that before.

The thing about anger is that it's like the protagonists final attack in an anime. They tell their allies to step back while they waste this motherfucker and lets loose a powerful, uncontrolled ray of fire or ice or whatever element that will hurt the other person the most.

Anger is a difficult thing to control, and it usually ends up being an all-or-nothing thing. Neither are healthy. The reason I bring up gender roles is that society thinks women are easier to deal with when they don't know there's an option other than patience and kindness. I don't advocate for negative emotion, I advocate for freedom of emotion. Men should be able to cry and so should women, yet the cry of a woman has been reduced to tearful sobbing. We forget that there is another definition that applies to both.

But cries of fury and frustration aren't cute. They aren't tame. They aren't "becoming of a lady." And the ironic thing, or I guess the appropriate thing, is that this in of itself make me mad. If we are only allowed to express our feelings through an inverted blow-horn where only an acceptable, mousy squeak can be heard, then the repealing of the 19th amendment is more plausible than we thought. Anger is not attractive, and it doesn't match with our fancy dresses, but when used correctly it shows that we are truly bothered and that we have the fuel and the passion to do something about it.